Positive goals attained and reaching out to the community to join our journey

Hudson Reporter

Jul 28, 2013 | 3165 views | 1 | 64 | |

Dear Editor:

As the Executive Director of the HHA, I wanted to highlight some positive achievements we’ve attained to create a healthier lifestyle for residents. I also want to extend an invitation to all Hobokenites to join us in our journey of revitalizing the housing authority community. I appreciate and welcome all dialogue and look forward to continuing the fruitful discourse.

We encourage everyone to work with this awesome opportunity of constructing a new Sandy-proof building that can replace the obsolete buildings currently located on our property. Such an improvement can only result in enhancing all residents' safety and quality of life. While offering the community at large amenities they too can benefit from those like the Mama Johnson Field.

Under my leadership, we have been transparent as a public agency and have always welcomed our neighbors to be part of the authority’s transformation. Unfortunately, we’ve had to contend with the naysayers and detractors who attempt to distort the truth for political gain and cast negative aspersions on the HHA and its families.

However, I want to commend and thank our sponsors for their involvement and donations to the recent successful events we've had to achieve our goals. First, we had our 8th annual incredible health fair to raise awareness and help residents live a healthier lifestyle. Secondly, we had our 2nd Annual Fatherhood Bike Rodeo Tour. This successful event offered their fathers to bond with the kids while doing something healthy and fun like riding throughout the city to learn about waterfront. I’m proud to congratulate our graduates from our excellent strengthening families program sponsored by partners in prevention, where mothers and their children prepared presentations about love and values. In partnership with the Skyclub fitness we’ve launched our HHA swim club for kids. We opened our new splash & spray water park. That was a great milestone for us.

As for the visioning process, I ask anyone who is interested to please e-mail me at director@myhhanj.org so you can get any questions answered or I can give you the facts on how we got here. You can find the Vision 2020 plan, it’s amendment on our website at myhhanj.com Never once have we stated that we would not host any community forums to engage the public. We were however moving ahead with one project because Super-storm Sandy had accelerated the funding process for agency’s that were devastated like ours that had an application ready to apply. One value that we all can agree onis, if better housing and more amenities can be provided for our children and the community at large then we should. I trust in this great community that it will demand of our leaders to change and step up. Let’s remove the politics to start focusing on the people and the progress of the HHA community as we are all in this together. We will host a series of public forums on July 31, Aug. 14 & 28 at 6p.m. and continue to set the record straight.